RENTON -- Marshawn Lynch had just been traded from Buffalo to Seattle in mid-season and was just settling in with his new teammates.

“There was a young receiver on our team, and he came in. And Marshawn had on a backpack,” Seahawks receiver Doug Baldwin said Tuesday, recalling a moment for 2010. Baldwin and the Seahawks face Lynch, now with the Raiders, on Sunday in London.

“And the young receiver was like, ‘Man, that’s a nice backpack. Where’d you get it from?’” Baldwin said.

“And he literally takes it off his back, dumps out all his stuff and says, ‘Here, you can have it,’ grabs his stuff and goes to his locker. Just as simple and as plain as that.

“Marshawn, it didn’t matter who you were, if you respected him and love him as a person, for who he was, literally he would give you the backpack off his back. I thought that was just the epitome of the man he was.”

The young receiver, of course, was Baldwin. “I just liked the color” of the backpack, he said Tuesday. He has since passed it on to former teammate Paul Richardson, now with Washington.

The backpack may be gone, but Lynch's legacy remains.

The running back is now 32 and in his 11th NFL season. He is playing his second season with his hometown Raiders, to whom he returned after after retiring briefly and sitting out the 2016 season.

Sunday will be the first time he has played against Seattle since he left at the end of his bizarre 2015 season (the Seahawks and Raiders annually play preseason games against each other, but Lynch never plays in those exhibitions).

“I gave him a hard time a couple of years ago when he first came back that he had gotten back into great shape,” his former Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said.

“(Like), how come we didn’t see any of that?”

Raiders coach Jon Gruden was a television commentator when Lynch was romping for the Seahawks. When Gruden returned to the NFL this offseason some in the Bay Area doubted the meticulous, hard-driving coach would get along with Lynch.

“He’s as advertised. He’s one heck of a player. He’s a great teammate,” Gruden said Tuesday. “I think he’s misunderstood by a lot of people. But he is a great, down-to-down competitor. Still as talented as any runner, I believe, as there is in the league.”

Lynch rushed for 130 yards two weeks ago against Cleveland, Oakland’s only win this season. It was his third 100-yard game in his two seasons with the Raiders, and his biggest rushing day since he had 157 yards for the Seahawks in their comeback win over Green Bay in January 2015 in the NFC championship game.

Last week he had just nine carries for 31 yards in Oakland's 26-10 loss at the Los Angeles Chargers. He has 331 yards and three touchdowns in five games this season for the team whose home stadium is a couple BART light-rail stops south of where he grew up in Oakland.

“He looks really good,” Carroll said. “He looks healthy and aggressive. He wants the ball more, you can tell that. His running style and everything about him looks good.”

The few remaining veteran Seahawks players who played with Lynch still miss him.

“He epitomized everything that we stood for here in Seattle,” Baldwin said.

The Seattle Seahawks have struggled for years to replace running back Marshawn Lynch's production and locker-room leadership.(Photo: Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports)

For Baldwin and fellow veterans Bobby Wagner, K.J. Wright, Russell Wilson, Justin Britt and J.R. Sweezy — the only starters left on the Seahawks from Lynch’s days — Lynch remains about so much more than running, pounding and punishing opponents.

To them, Lynch is about the time Justin Britt, in an early week of his 2014 rookie season, complained about how small his television was in his new Seattle-area apartment. The next day new, giant, flat-screen TVs were delivered to Britt — and all Seahawks offensive linemen — courtesy of Lynch.

To Baldwin, Lynch is also about the hilarity of “I’m just here so I won’t get fined” at the Super Bowl in Arizona in February 2015.

“He was amazing,” Baldwin said. “He brought a uniqueness. He was old-school, you know?

“You live in a world where everyone is trying to project this facade. You see on Facebook, you see on Instagram, you see on Twitter, everyone is trying to project this facade. And he was not about that. He was genuinely who he was, whether it was in the media, at my house for my birthday, in the locker room, out on the street with his family.”

There is no doubt the Seahawks miss Lynch on the field. Only in the last three weeks has Seattle gotten back to the run-based offense it had when Lynch was here. The Seahawks did not have three straight games with a 100-yard back from the end of the 2012 season, when Lynch ran for 100 yards in five consecutive games into the playoffs, until last week’s narrow loss to the Rams. That’s almost six full years.

It’s not difficult to see when the Seahawks stopped being a true contender for the Super Bowl. It happened about the time Lynch put those spikes on Twitter. They got smacked in the divisional round of the playoffs at Atlanta to end their first season without Lynch. Last season, the Seahawks missed the playoffs for the first time in six years.

They went from third in the league in rushing offense in Lynch’s final season with them, 2015, to 25th in 2016 then 23rd last year. They began this year 29th in the NFL in rushing, until their resurgence with the run the last three games.

“From a productive standpoint, a football-productive standpoint, we’ve missed him up until this point, right?” Baldwin said. “We’ve been searching for a running back to kind of take that role. And from a leadership standpoint, he has been missed.”

No doubt, Lynch left the Seahawks and NFL under what can charitably be described as less-than-optimal circumstances.

At the start of the 2015 season he symbolically jabbed at Seahawks management by wearing holdout Kam Chancellor’s jersey for a practice, to show solidarity with the Pro Bowl safety.

Lynch went away from the team for more than a month during a playoff drive in late 2015, to rehabilitate from abdominal surgery on his own with friends and a mixed-martial arts coach in his native Bay Area.

Upon his return to the team, the week of a wild-card playoff game at Minnesota in early January 2016, Lynch took the first-team snaps at tailback all week in practices. Then, as the players and coaches boarded buses at team headquarters for the drive to Sea-Tac Airport and the Friday flight to Minneapolis for the game, Lynch told the Seahawks he wasn’t going.

He declared himself out for a playoff game, when he was a primary part of Seattle’s game plan.

The following week Lynch started the divisional playoff loss at Carolina. A few weeks later, during the Super Bowl, he announced he was retiring on Twitter with a picture of his cleats hanging from a utility wire.

Did Baldwin mind how it ended with Lynch and the Seahawks?

“It’s football,” he said. “I mean, I’m looking at all of you, right. You all make a big deal out of football. But truth be told, at the end of the day, when we are on our death beds, football means nothing. Right? It really means nothing at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter how many ... like, I was talking to K.J. about this earlier today: I don’t care how many tackles he makes, or how many interceptions he has. I want to know, is he a good husband. Is he a good father to his children? Those are the most important things.

“So, honestly, don’t really care how it ended. Because I know the man. My relationship with Marshawn, and his relationship with guys he’s spent time with in this locker room, that doesn’t change — no matter if he’s in a different uniform, if he’s in a different country, doesn’t matter.

“He’s still Marshawn. He’s still our brother.”

Marshawn Lynch has 331 yards and three touchdowns in five games for the Oakland Raiders this season.(Photo: Jae C. Hong, AP)